Dymchuk Gallery presents Anton Sayenko’s exhibition Gryazne. The project is a continuation of the artist’s long experiments with the artistic forms and his reflections on the autonomy of art.
The core of the exhibition is the opposition of painting and photography. On the one hand – monochrome canvases with endless painted layers. On the other hand – works telling about the village Gryazne, where the artist spent his childhood. Together they capture a borderline state in which documentary and fictional, intellectual and emotional, past and present coexist.
Each painting by Anton Sayenko is a painting laboratory. Under the visible surface lies many layers: landscapes, sketches or monochromatic layers of paint. Therefore, his paintings should not be perceived as finished pieces that depict something or tell a story. They are always a process of finding a special visuality in which there is no object or narrative left – only painting as a fog that cannot be described verbally.
As a contrast, photography shows what the artist has abandoned in painting – a documentary image. It is no coincidence that he returned to the reflection of reality in his native village. The return to the image becomes a return to the origins, to the soil that once fed him. This metaphor becomes literal in the object made of soil from Gryazne.
Again, we will not see obvious stories in these pieces. They reflect the cultural state with which the artist identifies himself and his environment: peripheral, wandering; uncertain.
According to the artist, he is interested in finding something that means nothing and does not symbolize anything. He offers the viewer not a narrative story, but a subjective being in the moment. In this case, the exhibition is not a final statement, but rather an ellipsis in the process of endless research.
Anton Sayenko
Born in 1989 in Sumy.
In 2019 graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture.
Studied at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts and Method Fund.
In 2018 was the resident of GaudePolonia (Poland).
Works with painting, installation, performance, and land art.
Lives and works in Kyiv